[April 22nd will mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of the king of primetime soap operas, Aaron Spelling. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Spelling and other soap opera contexts, leading up to a crowd-sourced cliffhanger of a weekend post! So share your soapy responses and thoughts, you evil twins you!]
On
AmericanStudies takeaways from the first three televised soap operas.
1)
Faraway
Hill: The first televised soap was broadcast live once a week on the groundbreaking
DuMont
Television Network, aiming on Wednesdays between 9 and 9:30pm from October
to December, 1946. An adaptation of an unfinished novel from creator and longtime
TV writer and director David
P. Lewis, Faraway Hill told the story
of wealthy young widow Karen St. John (Flora Campbell) who moves away from New York to stay with relatives in the titular Kansas town and falls in love
with her niece’s fiancé. While that plotline sounds like plenty of other soap
opera stories, its show was quite strikingly experimental—as it aired live and
featured no commercials, the show made no money for the network; Lewis’ goal,
instead, was to “test
the mind of the viewer.” An interesting way to frame the entirety of the
new medium of television in that mid-1940s evolutionary moment.
2)
Highway to the Stars: The
experiment seemed to be a success, as less than a year later DuMont’s flagship
TV station, New
York City’s WABD, aired another live, weekly nighttime soap opera, this
time featuring commercials. That show was Highway
to the Stars, which ran from August to October 1947 and starred Patricia Jones as a talented
young singer trying to make it in the big city. As with Faraway Hill, Highway’s
live broadcasts means that unfortunately no extant copies of episodes remain,
so we can’t for example compare the two to see how the genre was evolving in
these early years. But I do think it’s interesting to note how early this new
TV genre tapped into one of the most iconic American stories, that perennial, Sister
Carrie-like tale of a young woman
traveling from her rural hometown to navigate the allure and challenges of the
city. If Faraway dealt with the
family melodrama that has so often defined soaps, Highway made clear that this new genre would likewise connect to
more universal stories.
3)
These
Are My Children: There’s no doubt that both Faraway and Highway have a strong claim to the title of “first TV soap opera”;
but since they aired once a week and at night, it’s understandable that the
daily daytime soap These Are My Children is
often granted that title. The show aired live and for only 15 minutes, from
5-5:15 every weekday on Chicago’s WNBQ from January to March, 1949, so it certainly
wasn’t yet the prerecorded, hour-long daily formula that came to define the
daily soap opera genre. But These was
created by Irna
Phillips, as I wrote yesterday already well-established by this time as a
pioneering figure in the soap opera genre, and was indeed closely based on
prior radio soaps of hers like Painted
Dreams. So it’s fair to say that These
was the first full attempt to translate the genre from radio to television, and
despite its short run (and runtime) thus represents an important watershed
moment.
Next
soap-post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Other soap opera contexts or stories you’d share?
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